Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/176

 15^ From Spell to Prayer.

throw himself literally, as far as his consciousness goes, into the work before him. He is so much one in idea with his instrument that the viana in him is as easily repre- sented as resident in it. Meanwhile the capacity of naive thought to personify whatever has independent existence must help out the transference, as may be illustrated abundantly from such a magnificent collection of spells as we get in the Golden Bough. Contrast the following pair of cases. In West Africa, when a war party is on foot, the women dance with brushes in their hands, singing "Our husbands have gone to Ashantee land; may they sweep their enemies off the face of the earth." "*' In much the same way in the Kei Islands, when a battle is in progress, the women wave fans in the direction of the enemy. What they say, however, is, "O golden fans! let our bullets hit and those of the enemy miss." ^^ We must not make too much of such a change from impersonal mention to personal address. It implies no more than a slight increase in vividness of idea. Still, as far as it goes, I take it, it is all in the direction of that more emphatic kind of personification which gives the thing addressed enough soul of its own to enable it to possess mana. In the following Russian example we seem to see the instru- ment first created, then invested with personality, and lastly filled with mana more or less from without : " I attach five knots to each hostile infidel shooter. . . . Do ye, O knots, bar the shooter from every road and way. . . . In my knots lies hid the mighty strength of snakes — from the twelve-headed snake.'' ■*■* Here the majia is added more or less from without, for, though a knot is enough like a snake to generate the comparison, yet the twelve-headed snake sounds like an intensification definitely borrowed

" G. B.;- " G. B.;-

(Greek).

•, 34 •. 33

. 33-

, 399. Cf. iii., 360, which introduces us to a ten-headed serpent